Soon, if you'd like to keep your job you MUST also like it.

First of all ask him WHY he asked you in the first place.

Next someone will publish a paper on how talking faster makes it more difficult to the listener to spot logical incongruencies.

What's even better is that you can prove that. Kind of.

Tell anyone to keep a tally of how much they spend and how much they win when playing. If they tell you that you logic is flawed because they can win more than they spend... *dare* them to prove you wrong in practice!

The more they try to prove you wrong, the more you will be proving your point.

I want to tell the doctor to go go f*(k himself.

But I see that he already did.

Kind of.

I have no problem with others knowing where I am at all times, how much money I have in my bank account, how I spend my money, etc. ...

As long as I can check their same details!

"If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"

Between two evils you should choose to support neither.

cat /dev/mouse
(move mouse)

There has to be some sort of way to safeguard the buyer from undue taxation by private companies given the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense (in terms of time) that goes into making a decent salary.

Isn't that so Mr. Milman?

If you want to teach PHYSICS, I recommend against digital circuits. There is much more Physics to learn from Analog(ue) circuit design and implementation. Indeed the first circuit I ever built was an AM radio reciever, according to instructions found on my school Physics textbook: "Physics for Today and Tomorrow" by Tom Duncan (IMHO the best Physics book ever) The component count is very low, about 10 components... the most expensive and difficult to find? of which are the the ferrite core and the variable capacitor. An AM radio receiver can be used to teach about electromagnetism, resonance, electronics, etc. Students wishing to go that extra mile can attempt to also build an AM transmitter (this can be even easier to build.)

As in going to work instead of me?

Yep,

Mirroring is not backup I agree.

Once I tried this at home...

Had a backup server where I kept my data, the server had a mirror with 4 disk; each disk had a copy of the data I was working on. Data was written to snapshots on a mirrored partition before being commited to the main partition in order to avoid losing data due some server management mishap. Data was written on this server through CVS to have more control over changes to data.

Guess how I lost my data?

The server got knocked off my desk and slammed hard against the floor!

Well, if you showed me some dough I "might" remember sir.

Just imagine this scenario...

1) You have the blueprints and technology
2) Hide blueprints and "forget" about technology
3) Ask for budget to redevelop
4) Redevelop using hidden blueprints
5) ???
6) Profit!

[Preliminary note: In the following text I use language and paradigm interchangeably. The reason is that programs are, more often than not, built according to the paradigms embraced by the languages they are programmed in.]

The paradigm/language chosen to start with is IRRELEVANT as long as the programming language used:

1. is easy to understand/read
2. comes with simple examples (not just syntax!) for ALL keywords/built-in functions
3. provides run-time debugging facilities(preferably visual) gives warnings on common mistakes(e.g. using = instead of == in a boolean expression)
4. give understandable feedback when unexpected behaviour occurs (e.g. out of bounds access, integer overflow)

Also of equal importance is the IDE used. While many programming teachers seem to be concerned with the paradigm/language to use, I think that the choice of which IDE to use is equally important.

I personally learned programming using the Turbo Pascal IDE from Borland (Dos based). It has all the "features" mentioned above in a manner that is easy for a beginner to use.

Today I tend to recommend C# as a language since it also provides the required facilities.

With regards to which IDE to use I shy away from presenting VisualStudio to beginners, prefering to recommend the use of SharpDevelop instead.

Important: once a particular starting language/paradigm has been well understood... encourage your students to proceed with other paradigms and languages.